In That Kind Climate the Mere Thought of Snow Was but a Wedding Cake

• Stuck at home in the snow? Play Philosophy Bingo! Or, if you suck at object subject subject object subject like me, play the center square, declare stalemate, quit.
• Stuck at home in the snow? Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossroads, at Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray, one of the best TNGs, is on right now. 
• Just saw a commercial for Chrysler, the conceit is great things have begun in garages, Wright Brothers, Disney, Hewlitt Packard, began in garages as did the Ramones, whose Rock and Roll Radio is the bed music.
• Academic cowards and why she doesn't post anonymously.
• Virtual identity and the control society.
• William Gass reading from Middle C.
• Time-travelling verb tenses must will have existed. 
• I saved the Hecht poem below on his birthday last week for a day like today.
• Woke up with Primitive Calculators in my head.

  
SESTINA d'INVERNO

Anthony Hecht

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven’s making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.

And, Even by Themselves, Those Fields of Clover, Cattails, Marsh Bracken, Water-Lily Pads Stirred by the Lightest Airs, Pliant, Submissive - Who Could Have Called Their Slow Creation Rage?

GREEN: AN EPISTLE

Anthony Hecht

     I write at last of the one forbidden topic
We, by a truce, have never touched upon:
Resentment, malice, hatred so inwrought
With moral inhibitions, so at odds with
The home-movie of yourself as patience, kindness
And Charlton Heston playing Socrates,
That almost all of us were taken in,
Yourself not least, as to a giant Roxy,
Where the lights dimmed and the famous allegory
Of Good and Evil, clearly identified
By the unshaven surliness of the Bad Guys,
The virginal meekness of the ingenue,
Seduced us straight into that perfect world
Of Justice under God. Art for the sake
Of money, glamour, ego, self-deceit.
When we emerged into the assaulting sunlight,
We had a yen, like bad philosophers,
To go back and stay forever, there in the dark
With the trumpets, horses, and ancient Certitudes
On which, as we know, this great nation was founded,
Washington crossing the Delaware, and so forth.
And all of us, for an hour or so after,
Were Humphrey Bogart dating Ingrid Bergman,
Walking together but incommunicado
Till subway and homework knocked us out of it.
Yet even then, whatever we returned to
Was not, although we thought it was, the world.

     I write at last on the topic because I am safe
Here in the grubby border town
With its one cheap hotel. No one has my address.
The food is bad, the wine too expensive,
And the local cathedral marred by restorations.
But from my balcony I view the east
For miles and, if I lean, the local sunsets
That bathe a marble duke with what must be
Surely the saddest light I have ever seen.
The air is thin and cool at this elevation,
And my desk wobbles unless propped with matchbooks.

    It began, I suppose, as a color, yellow-green,
The tincture of spring willows, not so much color
As the sensation of color, haze that took shape
As a light scum, a doily of minutiae
On the smooth pool and surfaces of your mind.
A founding colony, Pilgrim amoebas
Descended from the gaseous flux when Zeus
Tossed down his great original thunderbolt
That flashed in darkness like an electric tree
Or the lit-up veins in an old arthritic hand.

     Here is the microscope one had as a child,
The Christmas gift of some forgotten uncle.
Here is the slide with a drop of cider vinegar
As clear as gin, clear as your early mind.
Look down, being most careful not to see
Your own eye in the mirror underneath,
Which will appear, unless your view is right,
As a darkness on the face of the first waters.
When all is silvery and brilliant, look:
The long, thin, darting shapes, the flagellates,
Rat-tailed, ambitious, lash themselves along -
Those humble, floating ones, those simple cells
Content to be borne on whatever tide,
Trustful, the very image of consent -
These are the frail, unlikely origins,
Scarcely perceived, of all your shall become.
Scarcely perceived? But at this early age
(What are you, one or two?) you have no knowledge
Nor do your folks, not could the gravest doctors
Suspect that anything was really wrong.
Nor see the pale beginnings, lace endeavors
That with advancing ages shall mature
Into sea lettuce, beard the rocky shore
With a light green of soft and tidal hair.

     Whole eras, seemingly without event,
Now scud the glassy pool processionally
Until one day, misty, uncalendared,
As mild and unemphatic as a schwa,
Vascular tissue, conduit filaments
Learn how to feel the outposts of that small
Emerald principate. Now there are roots,
The filmy gills of toadstools, crested fern,
Quillworts, and foxtail mosses, and at last
Snapweed, loment, trillium, grass, herb Robert.
How soundlessly, shyly this came about,
One thinks today. But that is not the truth.
It was, from the first, an everlasting war
conducted, as always, at gigantic cost.
Think of the droughts, the shifts of wind and weather,
The many seeds washed to some salt conclusion
Or brought to rest at last on barren ground.
Think of some inching tendrils worming down
In hope of water, blind and white as death.
Think of the strange mutations life requires.
Only the toughest endured, themselves much altered,
Trained in the cripple's careful sciences
Of mute accommodation. The survivors
Were all, one way or another, amputees
Who learned to live with their stumps, like Brueghel's beggars.

     Yet, for all that, it clearly was a triumph,
Considering, as one must, what was to come
And, even by themselves, those fields of clover,
Cattails, marsh bracken, water-lily pads
Stirred by the lightest airs, pliant, submissive -
Who could have called their slow creation rage?

     Consider, as one must, what was to come.
Great towering conifers, deciduous,
Rib-vaulted elms, the banyan, oak, and palm,
Sequoia forests of vindictiveness
That also would go down on the death list
And, buried deep beneath the alluvial shifts,
Would slowly darken into lakes of coal
And then under exquisite pressure turn
Into the tiny diamonds of pure hate.
The delicate fingers of the clematis
Feeling their way along a face of shale
With all the ingenuity of spite.
The indigestible thistle of revenge.
And your most late accomplishment, the rose.
Until at last, what we might designate
As your Third Day, behold a world of green:
Color of hope, of the Church's springtide vestments,
The primal wash, heraldic hue of envy.
But in what pre-lapsarian disguise!
Strangers and those who do not know you well
(Yourself not least) are quickly taken in
By a summary prospect, shades of innocence.
Like that young girl, a sort of chance acquaintance,
Seven or eight she was, on the New York Central,
Who, with a blue-eyed, beatific smile,
Shouted with joy, "Look, Mommy, quick, Look. Daisies!"

     These days, with most of us at a safe distance,
You scarcely know yourself. Whole weeks go by
Without your remembering that enormous effort,
Ages of disappointment, the long ache
Of motives twisted out of recognition,
The doubt and hesitation all submerged
In those first clear waters, that untroubled pool.
Who could have hope for this eventual peace?
Moreover, there are moments almost of bliss,
A sort of recompense, in which your mood
Sorts with the peach endowments of late sunlight
On a snowfield or on the breaker's froth
Or the white steeple of the local church.
Or, like a sunbather, whose lids retain
A greenish, gemmed impression of the sun
In lively, fluctuant geometries,
You sometimes contemplate a single image,
Utterly silent, utterly at rest.
It is of someone, a stranger, quite unknown,
Sitting alone in a foreign-looking room,
Gravely intent at a table propped with matchbooks,
Writing this poem - about me.

• Anthony Hecht was born 91 years ago today.
• Every January 16th I type some variation of this sentence. One of the great fortunes of my life is to have met, been taught by, and been befriended by Tony Hecht.
• Yes, Green: An Epistle, posted every January 16th, is my favorite. Read it out loud if you have the chance.
• InfoSphere, Technocapitalism, and the Eclipse of the Human.
• Seeing surveillance.
• As two have you have mentioned, the captioning of links experiment ended quickly. As the same two mentioned, and I am in complete agreement, fine.
• Please send Arthur the coins in your pocket if you can spare them please.
• Four days late, but this past Sunday's New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Ladies and Gentleman, Windows 9. Only buy and use the odd numbered.
• I think I'd recognize the guy who was murdered if he was the old guy always around the cliffs on this section (the middle of three) of the Billy Goat.
• William Carlos Williams, for those of you who do.
• James and the Cold Gun.
• Woke up with The Feelies song below the poem in my head.
• A friend put a line of Stevie Nick's Rhiannon in my head (she is like a cat in the darkness then she is the darkness) and I retaliated. Win-win.
• I have listened to this at least a dozen and a half times today:

AN OFFERING FOR PATRICIA

Anthony Hecht

The work has been going forward with the greatest difficulty, chiefly because I cannot concentrate. I have no feeling about whether what I am writing is good or bad, and the whole business is totally without excitement and pleasure for me. And I am sure I know the reason. It’s that I can’t stand leaving unresolved my situation with Pat. I hear from her fairly frequently, asking when I plan to come back, and she knows that I am supposed to appear at the poetry reading in the middle of January. It is not mainly loneliness I feel, though I feel it; but I have been lonely before. It is quite frankly the feeling that nothing is really settled between us, and that in the mean time I worry about how things are going to work out. This has made my work more difficult than it has ever been before.

– From a letter to his parents dated November 9, 1955, Rome.

Hardly enough for me that the pail of water

              Alive with the wrinkling light

              Brings clearness home and whiter

Than mind conceives the walls mature to white,

Or that the washed tomatoes whose name is given

              To love fulfill their bowl

              And the Roman sea is woven

Together by threading fish and made most whole.

I delight in each of these, delight moreover

              In the dark skill of those hands

              Closer to wise than clever

Of our blind Italian landlady who stands

Her shoes fouled with the lustful blood of rabbit

              Lightly dispatched and dressed

              Fixing it to the gibbet

Of the clothesline where the laundry sails to rest.

These textures solicit of us our instant homage

              But are disparate senseless things

              Unless a reigning image

Bring them to purpose as your presence brings

The world in offering, like a chaplet worn

              In Aphrodite’s name,

              The furious unicorn

Come to the virgin’s lap tethered and tame.

And thus it is as you stand in this morning’s shadows

              Where ancient chamber pots

              Are grown to little meadows

Of mint and parsley; surely it’s love unknots

The winds for Ulysses and recalls to man

              A summer without cease;

              Sprung from the same dishpan

Onion and lily work their primal peace

You Come to a Gentle Indifference about Being Thought Either a Fool or Someone with Valuable Secrets, or: Tomorrow's High Egoslavian Holy Day Eve

A VOICE AT A SEANCE

Anthony Hecht

It is rather strange to be speaking, but I know you are there
Wanting to know, as if it were worth knowing.
Nor is it important that I died in combat
In a good cause of an indifferent one.
Such things, it may surprise you, are not regarded.
Something too much of this.

You are bound to be disappointed,
Wanting to know, are there any trees?
It is all different from what you suppose,
And the darkness is not darkness exactly,
But patience, silence, withdrawal, the sad knowledge
That is was almost impossible not to hurt anyone
Whether by action or inaction.
At the beginning of course there was a sense of loss,
Not of one's own life, but of what seemed
The easy, desirable lives one might have led.
Fame and wealth are hard to achieve,
And goodness even harder;
But the cost of all of them is a familiar deformity
Such as everyone suffers from:
An allergy to certain foods, nausea at the sight of blood,
A slight impediment of speech, shame at one's own body,
A fear of heights or claustrophobia.
What you learn has nothing whatever to do with joy,
Nor with sadness, either. You are mostly silent.
You come to a gentle indifference about being thought
Either a fool or someone with valuable secrets.
It may be that the ultimate wisdom
Lies in saying nothing.
I think I may already have said too much.

The Forty-Eight Keys of the Typewriter, Each an Eyeball That Is Never Shut

• Saturday's field-recording by Luca Forcucci. Field-recording requests for artists and pieces earnestly solicited. This is new to me. I've learned I really want to learn more.
• Thanks to everyone who sent Kind words via various methods re: Earthgirl and Planet's art. I've passed it on. Will post more occasionally, every few months or so. They both have blogs over in Me and Mine though both blogs have been dormant. Both say that's going to change. We'll see.
• Anthony's given his blog an excellent makeover. The content is why you should visit daily. This normally would lead to me whining about fucking blooger and my dead template button, but fuck it.
• We, the public (existing in your own word).
• After Sebalds' Austerlitz: Karen Stuke's photography.
• Sebald poem.
• Earthgirl lets me play Daniel Menche on trips to and from Ohio! I know I've played him here within the past few months. I like.
• The Book of Elements.
• Anne Sexton was born 85 years ago today. There's a story about a woman and Anne Sexton's poetry and my initiation into women and poetry which I've just told you all I'm ever going to tell you whether you're a digital or analog friend. There's a story Tony Hecht told me about Tony Hecht and Anne Sexton (and Hecht praised Sexton's poetry) which I won't tell here but if you ask me when you see me I'll tell you.

THE ROOM OF MY LIFE

Anne Sexton

Here,

in the room of my life

the objects keep changing.

Ashtrays to cry into,

the suffering brother of the wood walls,

the forty-eight keys of the typewriter

each an eyeball that is never shut,

the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,   

the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,   

the sockets on the wall

waiting like a cave of bees,

the gold rug

a conversation of heels and toes,

the fireplace

a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,

the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,   

the phone

two flowers taking root in its crotch,

the doors

opening and closing like sea clams,

the lights

poking at me,

lighting up both the soil and the laugh.

The windows,

the starving windows

that drive the trees like nails into my heart.   

Each day I feed the world out there

although birds explode

right and left.

I feed the world in here too,

offering the desk puppy biscuits.

However, nothing is just what it seems to be.   

My objects dream and wear new costumes,

compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands   

and the sea that bangs in my throat.

ALL MY PRETTY ONES

Anne Sexton

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart

where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;

a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,   

leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber   

you from the residence you could not afford:   

a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,

twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,   

the love and legal verbiage of another will,   

boxes of pictures of people I do not know.

I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,   

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...   

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy   

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.   

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile   

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.   

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.   

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began

the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly   

as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran   

the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me

and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went   

down and recent years where you went flush   

on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant   

to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.   

But before you had that second chance, I cried   

on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.   

Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;

here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,   

here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,   

running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;   

here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;   

and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.   

Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,   

my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept   

for three years, telling all she does not say   

of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,

she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day   

with your blood, will I drink down your glass   

of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years   

goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.   

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.   

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,

bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

I Invoked the White Robes, Gleaming Blades Ready for Blood, and, Feeling the Scourge of Increase and Multiply, Made Affirmation: *Yes,* Deliver Us from Complicity

There were no elections in Maryland I could boycott yesterday. I work and am friends with Virginians, most complained about the choice for governor between a rightwing ogre and a Clintonian scumbag. The rightwing ogre enjoyed the passion of his base, the Clintonian scumbag enjoyed the fear his base has of the rightwing ogre's base and won by four points. Same game as always. A reminder: it is easy for me as a citizen of one of the bluest precincts in one of the bluest districts in one of the bluest counties in one of the bluest states to tell someone in a swing state he or she shouldn't allow themselves to be blackmailed into voting for Clintonian scumbags by fear of a state run by Ken Cuccinellis. A friend emailed yesterday, said that between the party of austerity and the party of austerity that would ban birth control and gay marriage she'd hold her nose and vote for the party of austerity. The majority of my friends and loved ones would agree with that position even if they agree with me that the game is fucked from top to bottom. Everyone knows the game is fucked from top to bottom, everyone is fully aware how the game works. Everyone knows he or she is being worked, everyone negotiates his or her participation and complicity within that work, which for me currently involves screaming about the fucking game in general and at you about your complicity in particular as infrequently as I can manage these days.

Ironically, it's screaming about the fucking game that has always drawn and kept readers here but fuck it. Meanwhile, the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth is in sixteen days, expect lots, not a piece a day or such a self-imposed requirement, but expect lots. Requests solicited, I'm looking at you, Hamster.

THIRD AVENUE IN SUNLIGHT

Anthony Hecht

Third Avenue in sunlight. Nature’s error.   

Already the bars are filled and John is there.   

Beneath a plentiful lady over the mirror   

He tilts his glass in the mild mahogany air.

I think of him when he first got out of college,   

Serious, thin, unlikely to succeed;

For several months he hung around the Village,   

Boldly T-shirted, unfettered but unfreed.

Now he confides to a stranger, “I was first scout,   

And kept my glimmers peeled till after dark.   

Our outfit had as its sign a bloody knout,   

We met behind the museum in Central Park.

Of course, we were kids.” But still those savages,   

War-painted, a flap of leather at the loins,   

File silently against him. Hostages

Are never taken. One summer, in Des Moines,

They entered his hotel room, tomahawks   

Flashing like barracuda. He tried to pray.   

Three years of treatment. Occasionally he talks   

About how he almost didn’t get away.

Daily the prowling sunlight whets its knife   

Along the sidewalk. We almost never meet.   

In the Rembrandt dark he lifts his amber life.   

My bar is somewhat further down the street.

VASECTOMY

Philip Appleman

After the steaming bodies swept

through the hungry streets of swollen cities;   

after the vast pink spawning of family   

poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies;   

after the gamble of latex and

diaphragms and pills;

I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades   

ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge   

of Increase and Multiply, made

affirmation: Yes, deliver us from

complicity.

And after the precision of scalpels,

I woke to a landscape of sunshine where   

the catbird mates for life and

maps trace out no alibis—stepped   

into a morning of naked truth,

where acts mean what they really are:   

the purity of loving

for the sake of love.

"New Narrative" Is Judged Seditious

Found something I wrote twenty-five years ago while looking for something else. I thought it was gone forever, I'd been regretting its disappearance for years. It won't appear here, neither what I wrote or what a friend and mentor wrote in the margins. See tags for hint. Should I be more pleased than aghast or more aghast than pleased I recognize a younger me as my obvious predecessor? As mentioned yesterday, the objects of adoration change, the ardor of faith doesn't. Light reading elsewhere in any case, and an arrghfree day of links in celebration of surprise discovery and exhumation of previous self. Figures in a landscape. The above photo from a project from last year. In the shit. Serendipitously, new moleskin required two days ago. This is sand. Because reevaluation of old work requires reexamination of current work. Old rockers. I'd like to think it could appear here, it probably won't, though why it won't will no doubt make an appearance. No tears. Ashbery and Pasternak part one, part two. Working to change the equations which involves factoring damn on both sides of equal. RIP Faye Hunter. Ashbery's birthday in four days, I haven't forgot. The tennis-court oath. I realize I always approach the what-the-fuck and turn away, I'll see. The instruction manual. I haven't forgot Kate Bush's birthday is in six days.




 
...BY AN EARTHQUAKE

John Ashbery

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past.

B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her.

B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men.

A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.

A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled.

A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed.

A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.”

A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.

A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket

of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5.

A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into

the hands of A’s friend, A-2.

Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money.

Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account.

A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy.

A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences.

A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education, loses his ambition and enterprise.

A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.

A dies of psychic shock.

Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”

Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler.

Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream.

Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.

Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.   

A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.

Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.

Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.

A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.   

Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.

Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.

Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.

Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.

Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.

In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks.

More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus.

Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off.

Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart.

Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales.

A violent wind blows the fog around.

Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes.

Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree.

Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors.

Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily.

A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise.

Jarvis loses his small fortune in trying to help a friend.

Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico.

“New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street.

Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.

Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.   

Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping.

Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital.

Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves.

Sauntering in a park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act.

Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.

In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.   

Beatrice loved Alvin before he married.

B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.   

B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.

A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay.

Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town.

Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.   

No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.   

Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan.

Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.

It Began, I Suppose, as a Color, Yellow-Green, the Tincture of Spring Willows, Not So Much Color as the Sensation of Color, Haze that Took Shape as a Light Scum, a Doily of Minutiae on the Smooth Pool and Surfaces of your Mind

Another High Holy Day in Egoslavia. Anthony Hecht born 90 years ago today.

GREEN: AN EPISTLE

Anthony Hecht

     I write at last of the one forbidden topic
We, by a truce, have never touched upon:
Resentment, malice, hatred so inwrought
With moral inhibitions, so at odds with
The home-movie of yourself as patience, kindness
And Charlton Heston playing Socrates,
That almost all of us were taken in,
Yourself not least, as to a giant Roxy,
Where the lights dimmed and the famous allegory
Of Good and Evil, clearly identified
By the unshaven surliness of the Bad Guys,
The virginal meekness of the ingenue,
Seduced us straight into that perfect world
Of Justice under God. Art for the sake
Of money, glamour, ego, self-deceit.
When we emerged into the assaulting sunlight,
We had a yen, like bad philosophers,
To go back and stay forever, there in the dark
With the trumpets, horses, and ancient Certitudes
On which, as we know, this great nation was founded,
Washington crossing the Delaware, and so forth.
And all of us, for an hour or so after,
Were Humphrey Bogart dating Ingrid Bergman,
Walking together but incommunicado
Till subway and homework knocked us out of it.
Yet even then, whatever we returned to
Was not, although we thought it was, the world.

     I write at last on the topic because I am safe
Here in the grubby border town
With its one cheap hotel. No one has my address.
The food is bad, the wine too expensive,
And the local cathedral marred by restorations.
But from my balcony I view the east
For miles and, if I lean, the local sunsets
That bathe a marble duke with what must be
Surely the saddest light I have ever seen.
The air is thin and cool at this elevation,
And my desk wobbles unless propped with matchbooks.

    It began, I suppose, as a color, yellow-green,
The tincture of spring willows, not so much color
As the sensation of color, haze that took shape
As a light scum, a doily of minutiae
On the smooth pool and surfaces of your mind.
A founding colony, Pilgrim amoebas
Descended from the gaseous flux when Zeus
Tossed down his great original thunderbolt
That flashed in darkness like an electric tree
Or the lit-up veins in an old arthritic hand.

     Here is the microscope one had as a child,
The Christmas gift of some forgotten uncle.
Here is the slide with a drop of cider vinegar
As clear as gin, clear as your early mind.
Look down, being most careful not to see
Your own eye in the mirror underneath,
Which will appear, unless your view is right,
As a darkness on the face of the first waters.
When all is silvery and brilliant, look:
The long, thin, darting shapes, the flagellates,
Rat-tailed, ambitious, lash themselves along -
Those humble, floating ones, those simple cells
Content to be borne on whatever tide,
Trustful, the very image of consent -
These are the frail, unlikely origins,
Scarcely perceived, of all your shall become.
Scarcely perceived? But at this early age
(What are you, one or two?) you have no knowledge
Nor do your folks, not could the gravest doctors
Suspect that anything was really wrong.
Nor see the pale beginnings, lace endeavors
That with advancing ages shall mature
Into sea lettuce, beard the rocky shore
With a light green of soft and tidal hair.

     Whole eras, seemingly without event,
Now scud the glassy pool processionally
Until one day, misty, uncalendared,
As mild and unemphatic as a schwa,
Vascular tissue, conduit filaments
Learn how to feel the outposts of that small
Emerald principate. Now there are roots,
The filmy gills of toadstools, crested fern,
Quillworts, and foxtail mosses, and at last
Snapweed, loment, trillium, grass, herb Robert.
How soundlessly, shyly this came about,
One thinks today. But that is not the truth.
It was, from the first, an everlasting war
conducted, as always, at gigantic cost.
Think of the droughts, the shifts of wind and weather,
The many seeds washed to some salt conclusion
Or brought to rest at last on barren ground.
Think of some inching tendrils worming down
In hope of water, blind and white as death.
Think of the strange mutations life requires.
Only the toughest endured, themselves much altered,
Trained in the cripple's careful sciences
Of mute accommodation. The survivors
Were all, one way or another, amputees
Who learned to live with their stumps, like Brueghel's beggars.

     Yet, for all that, it clearly was a triumph,
Considering, as one must, what was to come
And, even by themselves, those fields of clover,
Cattails, marsh bracken, water-lily pads
Stirred by the lightest airs, pliant, submissive -
Who could have called their slow creation rage?

     Consider, as one must, what was to come.
Great towering conifers, deciduous,
Rib-vaulted elms, the banyan, oak, and palm,
Sequoia forests of vindictiveness
That also would go down on the death list
And, buried deep beneath the alluvial shifts,
Would slowly darken into lakes of coal
And then under exquisite pressure turn
Into the tiny diamonds of pure hate.
The delicate fingers of the clematis
Feeling their way along a face of shale
With all the ingenuity of spite.
The indigestible thistle of revenge.
And your most late accomplishment, the rose.
Until at last, what we might designate
As your Third Day, behold a world of green:
Color of hope, of the Church's springtide vestments,
The primal wash, heraldic hue of envy.
But in what pre-lapsarian disguise!
Strangers and those who do not know you well
(Yourself not least) are quickly taken in
By a summary prospect, shades of innocence.
Like that young girl, a sort of chance acquaintance,
Seven or eight she was, on the New York Central,
Who, with a blue-eyed, beatific smile,
Shouted with joy, "Look, Mommy, quick, Look. Daisies!"

     These days, with most of us at a safe distance,
You scarcely know yourself. Whole weeks go by
Without your remembering that enormous effort,
Ages of disappointment, the long ache
Of motives twisted out of recognition,
The doubt and hesitation all submerged
In those first clear waters, that untroubled pool.
Who could have hope for this eventual peace?
Moreover, there are moments almost of bliss,
A sort of recompense, in which your mood
Sorts with the peach endowments of late sunlight
On a snowfield or on the breaker's froth
Or the white steeple of the local church.
Or, like a sunbather, whose lids retain
A greenish, gemmed impression of the sun
In lively, fluctuant geometries,
You sometimes contemplate a single image,
Utterly silent, utterly at rest.
It is of someone, a stranger, quite unknown,
Sitting alone in a foreign-looking room,
Gravely intent at a table propped with matchbooks,
Writing this poem - about me.





I interrupt this Egoslavian High Holy Day: that's new Yo La Tengo. I bought five tickets last night to 2013 tour stop at 930 on Friday 2/15/13, which I only learned about after Planet called me fifteen minutes earlier to brag about seeing Yo La Tengo in Ann Arbor on February 8. Mr Alarum and Ms Xtina claim two of the tickets. As always, I am in awe of Serendipity, Mr Alarum can vouch for this Heh! The Hamster Signal is lit for the fifth ticket.

Yes, I c/ped last years Hecht bday post. Again: getting to know and learn from and work with Tony Hecht at Hilltop is one of the highlights of my life. Type Anthony Hecht in the search box top left of this shitty blog for earlier and more extended iterations of the previous prayer plus LOTS of his poems. Yes, I scanned and posted the above poem in the past month or two too, it's better typed out, it's my most air-guitared poem ever, it's infinitely infinitely infinitely better read out loud, yo.





Oh OK, have some links before they're stale: What we know, what we need to know. Aaron Swartz at risk. Freedom to connect. How the legal system failed Swartz, and us. Humanity failed Swartz. Justice is not law, law is not justice. Prosecutorial abuse.  Going platinum. I_Me_Mime. Hell is for other people. An almost word-for-word endorsement of al-Qaeda's worldview. Haha. Someone still lives here. Top economists at work. Women around the world at work. The ecology of hell. A belated Happy New Year. The complete list of places linked to Pep Guardiola. Thank you for not participating. Yes, again:





SESTINA d'INVERNO

Anthony Hecht

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven’s making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.

You Don't Notice the Birds Growing Silent or the Cold Towers of Clouds Moving In Because You're Explaining How Lovely and Cool It Was in the Woods

What is a pimento anyway, asked K (looking on her iPad at the above when it was header then) at a Thursday Night Pints none of us anticipated but JUMPED! at when L emailed. Was sweet. I don't get complementary colors, I said, the same green the same size as the red dot on a red dot the same size as the green is more than an opposite world. D said, sipping a martini, thanks in any case. K asked about everyone's Thanksgivings, all were quiet, subdued, only the skeeviest of third tier relatives tried to pick a political fight and were ignored, one true dick at D's, a wannabe true dick at K's. L asked, how much do you think Obama enjoyed serving lunch at the White House today to Romney on their playdate? What a fucking dick, said D. Romney too, said K. Then we talked about kids and grandkids. Congratulations, K. Please tell them YOU AND WHAT'SHISNAME DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE GENDER. It really is more fun that way.

• Evan Funk Davies played this Teardrop Explodes song Wednesday night, it made me think of the above, quite possibly my favorite song ever for many reasons including but not limited to whenever I hear it I get to think about some of my favorite memories ever.
• This week in war. 
• Rules.
• There's a drone in your future (if not present). 
• The invisible occupation.
• More on Obama's first post-election decision on the environment.
• Jesusfuck, Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready.
• Pastor Sanctimonious sanctimoniously tells you to shut up and eat your austerity and like it.
• Things worthy of note.
• Sixty-one years ago.
• The way we argue about Liberal peacocking.
• Down the primrose path.
• I don't think I'll own a VW - the terms of my acquiring one would need be overwhelmingly favorable, I've heard so much they suck - but for a shirt logo, VW is as good as any.
• Silver Line!
• UPDATE! This tweet mentions today is Jonathan Swift's birthday, which reminds me of Jon Swift, a Kind guy. I wonder if there will be a Blogroll Amnesty Day this year (I forget when exactly it was held), there's been no noise of Zappadan, which starts tomorrow, yes? if there was one. Blegsylvania's changed, is dying. In any case, in honor of Jon Swift, be Kind, fellow motherfuckers.
• How to hide a stolen steamship. 
• A short film about Theodore Roethke. I remember a professor (the one who wrote the martini poem above) telling me about this, his loathing for Roethke profound.
• Who doesn't want a compilation of poems about loneliness and solitude.
• Pondering the glut.
• Zombie playlist. Post playlists, send me playlists, I'll post them.
• Also heard this P.J. Harvey song yesterday. Cascade in works, been a few months, if you've a favorite let me know.

LAST DAY ON EARTH

Lawrence Raab

If it's the title of a movie, you expect
everything to become important—a kiss,
a shrug, a glass of wine, a walk with the dog.

But if the day is real, life is only
as significant as yesterday—the kiss
hurried, the shrug forgotten, and now,

on the path by the river, you don't notice
the sky darkening beyond the pines because
you're imagining what you'll say at dinner,

swirling the silky wine in your glass.
You don't notice the birds growing silent
or the cold towers of clouds moving in

because you're explaining how lovely
and cool it was in the woods. And the dog
had stopped limping!—she seemed

her old self again, sniffing the air and alert,
the way dogs are to whatever we can't see.
And I was happy, you hear yourself saying,

because it felt as if I'd been allowed
to choose my last day on earth,
and this was the one I chose.

Look Down, Being Most Careful Not to See Your Own Eye in the Mirror Underneath, Which Will Appear, Unless Your View Is Right, as a Darkness on the Face of the First Waters

Hey! solely for my sake and giggles, it's time for a bleggal-reset. That's the Official Theme Song of Egoslavia, has been since Day One, I'll get you an Archers of Loaf cascade soon, and because I discovered Eleanor Roosevelt was born 128 years ago today when performing my birthday dredge for material yesterday, have this,






the Official Autoblogography of this blog and the single most posted youtube in the history of this blog, Serendipitious at any and all times, any excuse to play the video is a good excuse. Here, have some politicopsychopathogy: If you wished to characterize the Democrats and the Republicans in terms of true exaggerations, you might say that the Republicans have become the Party of Psychosis while the Democrats have become the Party of Neurosis. The Republicans are psychotic because they have lost contact with reality, and orient their behavior not toward realities but toward fantasies. The Democrats are neurotic because they are aim-inhibited, as an old-fashioned shrink might say: their anxieties, hang-ups, and insecurities mean that they can’t attain satisfaction, since in a basic way they won’t even allow themselves to know what they want. Holyfuck, I'm enjoying POTUS waaaay too much (Obama fucking it up all by himself, not needing any help from us fucking hippies). Rather than document the fucker's fuck-ups again today, have instead: a three hour playlist from my early twenties; Hobsbawm's intro to 2012 edition of Communist Manifesto; via friend Frances a reaction to her brave Missouri adventures in making you ashamed to be a liberal; via friend Greyhoos the angry letters of John Lennon; via friend Biblioklept some info about the guy I've never heard of who just won the Nobel in Literature; via friend Dan thoughts on criticism we don't like; via me my favorite Anthony Hecht poem (Green, plus a bonus because scan; click to enlarge), and more Fennesz. Busy really bad some places, busy really really good others, back tomorrow if we Thursday Night Pints tonight, back soon enough one way or the other.